Sublimation and Dieting
Sublimation: “to divert the expression of (an instinctual desire or impulse) from its unacceptable form to one that is considered more socially or culturally acceptable.”
I know I’m deep into a diet when my Instagram feed becomes almost entirely food. Scrolling through not only pictures of chefs preparing haute cuisine, but bacon wrapped onion rings, with cheese centers that are then somehow wrapped in a fried cheese skin cooked on a griddle. The creativity with food abounds.
When I separate myself from that equilibrium I’ve managed to claw my way into, maintaining my weight, and try to plunge ever lower, there is something missing from my life. Calories! But it isn’t just calories, it can’t be. Although, when I am getting enough calories, I don’t seem to get the same inundation from IG, I also don’t seem to care much about old episodes of Chef’s Table, or Top Chef, or seem to have much inclination for creativity with cooking whatsoever.
When I was 23 and I did a ~600 calorie a day liquid diet for two months, I had so little energy that I sat and watched a lot of TV, A LOT. Mostly I watched, the then new, Food Network. Possibly it wasn’t all that new, but I had never heard of it before. I found some relief from my state of starvation by watching others prepare and consume food. When something looked especially good, I’d think “one day I will try that.” I wound up dieting for so long that my “I’ll try that” kept getting kicked down the road and I finally settled on merely making some of the fantastical things I’d now spent so much time watching others create and serving them to others.
I desperately want food to be simply a source of fuel for my body, I want all the pleasure and reward schemes in my brain turned off so that I can get on with my life. But food is buried even deeper than that for me. I associate everything with food. Camping is meats cooked over an open flame without the benefit of a grill, Disneyland is turkey legs and corn dogs, movies are popcorn and hot dogs. Even geographical locals can’t escape this conundrum, the only places on earth I don’t want to visit are places that serve food I’m not excited about eating. So even if when I haven’t eaten some of these food type in years, and I’m deep into dieting, my mind starts working a mile a minute conjuring images of all the different foods in all the different lands that I associate with pleasure.
My wife used to joke, “when you diet, we all gain weight.” I can get hyper focused and even obsessive. What I can’t eat, I can cook. The flip side of course is everyone disappointed when some holiday rolls around and I’ve been on maintenance for some time and I don’t care too much one way or the other about cooking. It seems to be a fine line with me. And since I’ve been mostly maintaining for some years now, my kids disappointment has only grown.
If I can actually pull myself out of myself and take as much of an exterior view as possible, I think the rational part of me wants to be able to enjoy food occasionally but mostly be unswayed by it. I’m generally not thinking about food when I’m actively doing other things, playing with my dogs, or working out, writing, doing a podcast or at work. These are all healthy pursuits that I never seem to be overly or hyper focused on.
So when I find myself scrolling through the 5th or 6th frame of some food porn on social media, or I begin to daydream about making cassoulet for my granddaughter, I now see it as a signal that it’s time to put down my phone and do something else.